A visit to Shiloh

The National Military Cemetery at Shiloh battlefield.

At Shiloh, the awesome violence of modern warfare first presented itself: Union and Confederate troops clashed April 2-3 on banks, fields and forest near the banks of the Tennessee River. In one battle, they took more casualties than America had suffered in all its previous wars: 23,746 killed, injured or missing.

On the first day, the Confederates surprised the Union forces, pushing them back toward the river in a near-rout. Confederate generals went to sleep thinking the next day would be nothing but a clean-up operation. Gen. U.S. Grant had other ideas. His forces, strengthened by overnight reinforcements, counter-attacked at dawn. The fighting raged for hours; the blood flowed by the gallon. The Confederates retreated to defend the rail junction at Corinth, MS. There were other battles in the Western war, but none as deadly and decisive as Shiloh.

At one point, we took a wrong turn on our battlefield tour and came upon a reminder that, for some, the war continues:

Andrew Jackson and me

When I was young, family legend had it that we were in some way related to President Andrew Jackson. I was proud of that, though I didn’t know much about Old Hickory back then. In my 20s, I found myself in Charlotte, NC, and took a drive out to a place known as the Waxhaws, on the North Carolina/South Carolina state line. That’s where some ancestors on my mother’s side lived for awhile back in the late 1770s. I couldn’t find anything but pine trees, but I had little expert guidance.

A cousin of mine did more serious research later. She reported back that we weren’t related to Jackson by blood, though our people may have known his people in passing.

An interesting fact I learned touring Jackson’s home: In a duel defending his wife’s reputation, Jackson took a lead bullet that lodged inches from his heart. Surgeons decided they couldn’t safely remove it, so it stayed there for 35 years, leeching lead into his system. He was a very sick man for much of his life, with a variety of ailments. Not only did he get lead poisoning from the bullet, his doctors fed him medicine containing both lead and mercury. Did those chemicals cause brain damage, or contribute to flashes of temper, paranoia and bad judgment? The guide I asked declined to speculate.

Some more thoughts about the president I’m happy to no longer consider part of my family here.

The Trump rally from the outside

NASHVILLE - Trump's rally in Nashville Wednesday was typical of what we've seen from this campaign for a year: Understaffed, poorly organized and - thanks to his supporters - a huge success.

Nashville Municipal Auditorium holds about 8,900 people, but the campaign gave out digital tickets to anyone that asked. People started lining up at dawn for seats for the 6:30 p.m. rally. The line grew and grew, with many more people than the venue could hold. There were no volunteers organizing the line - some people were stuck for an hour in what turned out to be a "fake line," before being sent to the back of the real line. There were no campaign staffers communicating with the people who were waiting in sub-freezing temperatures to see their president - and waiting mostly in vain. There were no overflow rooms or outdoor screens so the people outside could watch.

The doors opened at 3:30, but TSA and the Secret Service had only a handful of metal detectors on hand, so screening was ridiculously slow. Trump delayed his speech by a half-hour, and there were still hundreds of empty seats when he started because of the inadequate security planning.

I was one of thousands still in line when Trump began speaking. I was at least five blocks from the front door, and there were hundreds of people behind me in line. A police officer told us there was no way we'd make it inside, but many of the faithful refused to give up. They watched the speech on cell phones if they could, or vowed to watch it when they got home.

"Even if we don't get in, this was still worth it," a young woman waiting with me said.

"Just to see this many people," said another. "It gives you hope."

The people in the Trump line were quiet, patient and friendly as can be. They policed themselves, ejecting line-jumpers to keep things orderly. They had nothing but positive things to say about their president. If there are Trump voters in Tennessee having buyer's remorse, they weren't freezing their buns off in line Wednesday afternoon.

I left the line to check out the protesters up front, which was a considerably louder group. The protesters were only loosely organized, and improvisational in their signs and chants. There were thousands of them as well, expressing their views in a handful of small rallies throughout the day and a free-form demonstration outside the arena.

There were a few harsh words exchanged between Trump and anti-Trump forces. One confrontation ended with the protesters shouting down a Trump supporter with the classic Southern put-down: "Bless your heart."

As we used to say in the Tennessee country weekly where I once toiled, a fine time was had by all.

Here are a few photos from the event. Click on the image to see the next photo.

Trump in Nashville

Above are folks in the longest line I've ever seen, waiting patiently in the wicked cold to get into Donald Trump's rally in Nashville today. The line went on for miles, and thousands of people - myself included - couldn't get in.

Tickets were free, and some local Resistance organizers were calling on folks to reserve tickets and not go, so there would be an embarrassing number of empty seats. That didn't happen. In Nashville, a blue city in the middle of a red state, Trump could probably have filled the arena twice.

Tennessee gave Trump 61 percent of its votes in November, but a poll last month had his approval rating down to 51 percent in the Volunteer State. All I can say from my experience today is that Trump's core supporters are definitely still behind him

Tuscaloosa, Alabama

I couldn't resist this one. We didn't have enough time in Tuscaloosa to get to know the place beyond the obvious, that it is the Valhalla of college football. Besides, the place is deserted for Spring Break. I must say I have never seen such huge, magnificent frat houses. As they say around UA, Roll Tide.

Mike Marino's story

Mike Marino is 76, and has lived his whole life in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood. “It’s the lowest point in the city, 15 feet below sea level,” he says. “All the water went there.”

“Everyone wants to talk about Katrina,” he told me. “We’d rather not hear the word again.” But he keeps talking about it.

“People don’t talk enough about all the amazing who came from all over the country to help us out. They should be the big story. I know a guy in the media and I asked him why they don’t talk more about that. He said ‘you can hear that kind of stuff in church.”

“I wanted to punch him in the mouth.”

Marino offers three lessons from his experience with Katrina:

1.    “When they tell you to evacuate, evacuate.” His house was destroyed, but his family’s lives were saved.

2.    “Everybody needs everybody. Even people you don’t like, in a hurricane you need them.”

3.    “Go hungry if you have to, but buy insurance.” It was a month before he could even get into his house to see what was left. He lived for awhile in a trailer with his wife and grown son – which was awful, he says – and for more than a year in temporary housing while his house was repaired. Because he had insurance, it was all paid for.

The Big Easy

In New Orleans, you can hear better music standing on the sidewalk than in the top venues of most other cities.

Finding the Duffie Oak

The Duffie Oak, a 300-year-old live oak in Mobile, Alabama.

Sometimes the lesser-known attractions are the best, and finding them is half the fun.

Ellen and I have gone out of our way in our travels to seek out Significant Trees. I found online that one such tree, Duffie’s Oak, could be found in Mobile, Ala. It was at least 300 years old, making it Mobile’s oldest inhabitant, and was said to be of impressive size. But the references we found  - most online citations about the tree seemed cut-and-pasted off of Wikipedia - left out the address. The two people staffing a tourist information center downtown had never heard of it. We all Googled around a bit, then another staff member, older than the other two, came in and said he knew the Duffie Oak very well. It’s on private land, behind an apartment building, he said. The folks who built the apartment building wanted to cut the tree down, but a public outcry stopped them.   

It’s still there, on the 1100 block of Caroline Street, the widest tree I’ve ever seen. Its branches cross the narrow street, touch the ground and go up again. Its roots roll across the landscape. It is a climbing tree like no other - a hundred people could climb it at once. It’s tucked away on a tiny street of circa 1903 shotgun houses, and it seems to be thriving.

Definitely worth the visit.

That's me, putting the Duffie Oak in perspective.

A tree on the same street, showing signs of the recently-ended Mardi Gras.

Crossing the bridge

In 1965, marchers for voting rights crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, sparking an explosion heard and seen around the world. Marchers crossed again Sunday, in an exercise that was more celebration and commemoration than confrontation. This year, with Donald Trump in the White House and state legislatures in Alabama and elsewhere intent on making it harder to vote, the Bridge Crossing commemoration took on a new urgency. Keep on marching, the leaders urged, keep on moving to a brighter, more free tomorrow.

Here are some images from the march.

Home on the road

The first night in our temporary home, a small travel trailer pulled by a big truck.

Both are rented for this phase of the journey, to give us a chance to see whether we can handle towing a trailer or whether a self-contained RV would be a better fit. My priority is to be able to park the house in a scenic spot and have a separate vehicle to take out on excursions. My traveling companion is skeptical of our ability to handle the highway towing a house behind us. So far, so good, but I haven't had to back the thing up yet.

We spent the night in a pull-through site in Tanner, Alabama, in an RV park right by the side of the highway. Today we're off to Decatur, Ala., site of a significant Civil War battle, then on to a more scenic (and quieter) campground.

The mockingbird's greeting

The Parthenon, Nashville-style.

Hours after arriving in Nashville, we visited the Parthenon in Centennial Park, an exact replica of the one in Greece, built to celebrate Nashville's pre-Music City nickname, "the Athens of the South."

We were greeted by a bird on a post with a distinctive song. The mockingbird - Tennessee's official state bird - doesn't repeat itself like most songbirds, instead improvising an original tune each time it opens its beak. This is the mockingbird who welcomed us the the Volunteer State. You can hear him sing here.

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The journey begins

I've always planned to travel in retirement, but since the last election, the desire to hit the American road has taken on a new urgency. I want to find out what the hell is going on in my country. Are we as divided as polls and election returns say? Is there a common ground we can rediscover?
I want to help answer these questions, in dispatches from every corner of America, reporting from the real places we too often reduce to primary colors on an election map. I’d like to do more listening than arguing, to write less about what’s happening in Washington and more about what’s happening in America, to seek out the ties that bind us together as well as those that pull us apart.
My reports will appear as weekly columns in GateHouse newspapers across the country (including my longtime employer, the MetroWest Daily News), and in more frequent updates here on Facebook and on a new website I hope to have ready for primetime soon.
Our first stop is Nashville, where we were greeted this morning by sirens announcing a tornado watch. Ellen, my wife and traveling companion, finds that worrisome, as we'll soon take a travel trailer into parts unknown. I see it as welcome sign of the adventures ahead.
The road ahead takes us to Alabama, New Orleans, Mississippi and Memphis. Like this page and watch this spot for news, photos, and whatever clarity we find along the road.